A lap-seven safety car forced a simple choice - and McLaren got it wrong, throwing away Piastri’s win and giving Verstappen a shot at the title, as Mark Hughes explains
Verstappen heads into Abu Dhabi just12 points behind Norris
Max Verstappen made the point recently that he’s in title contention only because McLaren has let him in. Qatar proved that point again. Verstappen took his seventh victory of the season in a Red Bull that looked nowhere near McLaren for much of the weekend. But he was handed it by McLaren’s bizarre decision not to pit either race leader Oscar Piastri or third-place Lando Norris under a lap-seven safety car. The rest of the field – including second-place Verstappen – drove into the pitlane for their free stop and that was Piastri’s victory gone. It really was as simple as that.
Piastri was never going to make up the time lost by not pitting. He was fit to be tied afterwards. Norris – not quite on Piastri’s pace all weekend – managed to pressure Kimi Antonelli into relinquishing fourth on the last lap but the third-place Williams of Carlos Sainz was safe.
So Verstappen heads to Abu Dhabi next week 12 points behind Norris and four in front of Piastri. The numbers still favour Norris but there does seem to be an inevitability about the way events are conspiring to give Verstappen opportunities.
The 25-lap tyre limitation prescribed the strategy of the race as a two-stop. The safety car for a Nico Hülkenberg collision with Pierre Gasly came on lap 7, which coincidentally was the minimum number of laps needed to complete without being forced onto a much slower three-stop. So with that requirement met, there was absolutely no reason for anyone not to pit under the safety car.
Verstappen didn’t appear to have the pace to beat Piastri early on
Red Bull
Except for McLaren, which was caught in a moment of torment because bringing in both cars would involve Norris being stacked and losing several places. Bringing one in and not the other would inevitably favour one and disfavour the other and so with their minds focused on trying to equalise the opportunities of their two drivers, they left both out, opening the door to Verstappen, who drove clean through it.
Norris couldn’t even clear Sainz and Williams before his second stop. Two laps earlier, Piastri had exited behind the Mercedes but immediately caught it at the perfect place on his new tyres – at the end of the DRS zone into Turn 1 and threw it down the inside to retake second.
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Pablo Elizalde
Norris caught it not quite close enough to put a new-tyred pass on it there. By the next lap he no longer had the extra tyre grip to make it work – and he was stuck there. Until the last lap, that is, when he was able to take advantage of Antonelli suffering a big twitchy moment into Turn 9 which ran him off the road on the exit and allowed Norris by.
Sixth-place George Russell got himself on all the wrong parts of the track in the opening few corners, dropping from fourth to seventh, behind Fernando Alonso, then losing a further place to Isack Hadjar at the first stops after being stacked behind Antonelli.
Alonso later spun and Hadjar suffered a puncture, the latter moving Alonso back up to seventh. Charles Leclerc could not find the words to describe how bad the Ferrari was around here after dragging it to eighth ahead of Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls and Yuki Tsunoda’s Red Bull.
